Thomas and Mary Hughes
Tower Hamlets has its share of blue plaques, though not as many as some of us would like. That imbalance will be redressed slightly next week, when a plaque to Thomas Fowell Buxton is unveiled at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.
It’s unusual to find memorials for father and daughter though - and facing each other on opposite sides of the street. In Vallance Road, Bethnal Green (better known for another family operation with less lofty aims) you’ll find Hughes Mansions, remembering Thomas Hughes. Right across the street is a blue plaque to Mary Hughes, his daughter - and mementoes to Mary are found scattered around the borough.
Thomas Hughes was one of that English band of muscular middle class reformers that seemed to thrive in Victorian England. A QC, judge, MP and author, he had been a star of the cricket team at Rugby School under the famous headship of Dr Thomas Arnold (a friend of his father’s from Oxford) whose religious and reforming zeal left a lasting mark on the young man.
Hughes was born in 1822. Though he left school before the sixth form (his final act being a school cricket match at Lord’s Cricket Ground), he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, was called to the bar in 1845, became an MP for the emerging Liberal Party in 1865 and was made a county court judge in 1882. We know him best today for his then-shocking novel ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. He also wrote a number of non-fiction works, with meditations on faith including ‘Religio Laici’ and ‘A Layman’s Faith’. Perhaps his most remarkable venture though was the settlement he founded in America. Rugby, Tennessee was ‘an experiment in utopian living for second sons of the English gentry’. It wasn’t a success.
Mary Hughes, meanwhile, was less concerned with the slightly distressed sons of the gentry, and much more with the appalling lot of the East End working classes. Mary, born in 1860 had the social concern typical of many Victorian daughters of the gentry. She would drive to do her work in a comfortable carriage and be driven home afterwards. But something deeper was stirring within her - a sense that her privileges were deeply unfair and that the whole class system was wrong.
It wasn’t an idea guaranteed to endear her to her contemporaries, but Mary went further. She became more immersed in the ideas of the Christian Socialists and of Quakerism (of which more again next week). She decided to live with the East End poor and to become one of them. In 1895 she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law, the curate of St Jude’s in Whitechapel. By the time she moved on in 1915, to Kingsley Hall in Bow, she had become a ’shabby and sometimes verminous woman’, totally committed to helping those around her. During her time there, she met Gandhi during his sojourn in London.
Soon she had become a Quaker herself, though still attending Anglican services (a so-called ‘Quanglican’). She put her ideas into practice with the Dew Drop Inn, opened in 1826 in a former pub at 71 Vallance Road. The name was a pun, inviting anyone passing and in need to drop in. Quaker architect Malcolm Sparks did the conversion work, and S Grylls Wilson (an Anglican architect, thus neatly completing the set) did further work in 1928, looking after the building for the rest of Mary’s life.
And it was a long one. Mary had undertaken her grand and humble mission at the age of 66, yet her energy was a legend. ‘At the end of a long day, if the rest of the hostel was full, the old lady would push papers and old clothes aside and sleep in a bed chair,’ wrote one contemporary observer. The Inn had rooms for ‘lodgers’ (some people came and never went), Christian Socialist religious services, rooms for the study of sociology (the local poor made good research material), and for trade union meetings.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the eccentric and hardline Mary had little truck with the compromises her Labour Party had to make as a (now major) political force. George Lansbury commented that ‘Our frail humanity only produces a Mary Hughes once in a century.’ The defeat of the General Strike in 1926 and Ramsey MacDonald’s money saving cuts in the dole in 1931 loosened the ties further.
Mary died, aged 81 in 1941. German bombs were falling on a London she had first seen in a Victorian era of horse and cart rather than powered flight. Four years later, the last V2 rocket attack on the capital would hit Hughes Mansion, that memorial to her father, killing 133 people. Mary’s name is also remembered in the Mary Hughes Building at 22 Underwood Road (off Vallance Road), an ante-natal clinic and later centre run by Tower Hamlets Council.